Monthly Archives: September 2007

Back in Bull Island

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I Say Take it Back

I Say Take it Back

We’re back! A few days after landing in DC we’ve returned to my ancestral homeland of Poquoson, Virginia. Here we are visiting the parents, catching up with current events and trying to remember how Sales Tax works. I have to say, for anyone considering doing a Round-the-World trip, it’s a good idea to leave yourself some “acclamation” time on the tale end. We’ve built in a period where we can visit the friends and family we haven’t seen all year and that’s been great, but one added benefit is that it’s given us time to kind of readjust to life in these United States, much needed time.

How have we been spending that time here in Poquoson? Lawn work, small chores around the house, collecting the paperwork to file our taxes. Small stuff that we either had no access to while zipping from city to city or site to site, or just didn’t have time for. It’s been a great reintroduction to “normal” life here.

For the next month or so we’ll still be traveling, but at a much slower pace and it will mostly be in places we are familiar with: Virginia, Ohio, DC, Oregon and Texas. So we won’t be jumping around as much to see things we may never have another chance to see, rather we’ll be relearning how to approach things that are very familiar and dear to us.

The Torch is Passed

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So Sophisticated!

So Sophisticated!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of the Internet, it is my fond pleasure to introduce to you today the blog styling of sophisticatedalpaca.com.

This blog with the funny name is the round the world travel blog of our friends and former neighbors Dennis Campbell and Kristi Barnes. It seems the travel bug is contagious and with no prodding from us, but maybe a little inspiration via this blog (self-congratulatory pat on back) Dennis and Kristi are headed out on their own world trip today.

And I have to say they are doing a REAL world trip – every populated continent, the whole ticket, no population groups will be spared. And do I have to say “Easter Island”?!? They are going to Easter Island! I’m so jealous, they are going to blow our trip out of the water.

So if your tired of our stale jokes, our predictable attitude to the locals we meet or our crap photography head on over to sophisticatedalpaca.com for bright insights, informative travel writing and witty commentary on the state of the world.

Seriously, one of the things we hoped to do with this blog was inspire other folks to get off the couch and get out into the world. We couldn’t have guessed back in January how close to home that inspiration would find fertile ground. We wish them the best of luck and the safest of travels.

They’re Coming to America – Today!

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Back in the U-S-S-R, er, A!

Back in the U-S-S-R, er, A!

And we’re back! After the better part of nine months on the road overseas we’re finally going to be Stateside again. Now here is where a lot of people will get caught up on the fact that we’re “Home” again. While we are indeed back in the States, and we won’t be having our passports stamped again on this trip – it’s not exactly over.

We’re back home, but we’re still traveling technically. We’ll fly into Dulles on September 17th, visit both sets of folks for a while, attend a wedding in DC; then fly out to the Oregon and visit some of our West Coast people. After that, we hit Texas and visit more folks. We probably won’t be “Back-Back” at home in Washington, D.C. until some time in November.

Some people will say this is anticlimactic, others will say that we are drawing it out, still some others will say we’re sell-outs (I’m not sure why, but there’s always someone ready to call you a sell out). We say, if you don’t like it plan your own damn trip. We have a few North American legs still available to us as part of our One World Explorer ticket and we don’t intend to waste them.

Are we excited to be home? You betcha! Are we ready to unpack our bags, not quite – besides, we rented our house out for the year so we need to keep moving.